Paper short abstract:

Our research wants to understand how visitors shape their visit during a city-trip in Brussels. We investigate the relationship between travel project and tourist practices by means of a qualitative method which includes direct observation and semi-structured interviews.

Paper long abstract:

Urban tourism has been increasing in the past decades, and tourist practices constitute now an important challenge in contemporary cities. It's therefore of primary importance for researchers to investigate how visitors create their urban visit.The study case of this research is the Belgian capital. In the first instance we will discuss the travel project as an appropriate conceptual frame for describing the purposes of visitors. Tourist practices will then be taken into account as a central notion for this investigation. The gap between the travel project and tourist practices has proven to be crucial in establishing the key factors influencing the visitor's choice.

Our target of research are European visitors coming to Brussels for a self-organized city-trip. The work is based on in-field observation and semi-structured interviews, started in July 2019. The qualitative method resulted the best option to map the visitor's practices and identifying his profile. In addition, the semi-structured interview allows to give a relevant role to the visitor's perspective and to the tourist imaginary related to the urban tourism. Our results show that the gap between what is planned before a city-trip and the tourist practices chosen on the spot is influenced by the priority given to particular activities. Furthermore, we can identify different types of visitors in relation to their choices of activities. For example, we noticed that people who have experience in urban tourism tend to have a more standardized modus operandi, which can be influenced by other variables like educational level, etc.